Telltale Explorer – a program to extract, view and convert resources from the 4 Telltale games that have been released so far. The tool will be instantly familiar to anyone that’s used Psychonauts Explorer, it uses the same interface and has similar features.

Some of the things that you can do with the latest version of Telltale Explorer:

After being plagued by comment spam the site’s news system has been changed from Cutenews to WordPress. This wont affect the site much, old url’s are automatically redirected, the only thing that people need to change is the url of the RSS feed.

Alongside this, the site’s design has been changed to give it a cleaner, more modern appearance. There shouldn’t be any problems with the new site, but if you notice anything please let me know.

The program expands upon a feature of the now defunct ScummVM Q+E – it provides a friendly, quick and easy frontend to the ScummVM command line tools. For those that dont know, these tools let you compress the audio and video files in many games, extract the datafiles from certain games and decompile scripts from SCUMM games, the Legend of Kyrandia and Broken Sword 2.

These extra tools dont have a gui and previously required much typing at the command prompt if you wanted to tweak the settings. Now though, you can just use the ScummVM ToolBox. It uses a simple wizard-style interface modelled on that used by Nero Express, downloads all the extra files needed, cleans up any temp files and replaces command line switches with a friendly interface. All you need to do is download the program and run it.

In truth this program isnt completely new, I released it on the ScummVM forums a few months ago. I havent really had the time or motivation to make any further changes so I’m releasing it as it is. There are some missing features, these are listed in the readme, if you would like to see these added you can always contact me and ask.

Firstly a big thank-you to everyone who’s donated through Paypal. I really appreciate your support. Quick and Easy Software is now more than 4 years old and from a test project I made to teach myself programming, its grown into the juggernaut* that you see today.

I’m continuing to work on existing and new programs; recently I’ve been able to deceipher a bit more of the Psychonauts PS2 resource file and have now located the speech and music files. In the past some people have expressed interest in translating some of my programs into other languages. If anyone’s still interested in this then let me know. Obviously you will need to be reasonably fluent in both English and your other language, but its not like the programs contain a great deal of text. I myself cant translate my programs, as they arent made up of French road directions or German numbers.

* I considered using the word behemoth instead, but that was a lie too far.

Its always the way, you fix one thing and something else breaks. An odd bug appeared in the last release of the Grim Fandango Launcher – the debug keys window had no scrollbar, so most of the keys weren’t visible. Thanks to Mark Aplin for letting me know about this.

While replaying Grim Fandango recently, the ever-vigilant Huz spotted a bug with my Grim Fandango Launcher. The launcher checks if the Grim patch has been installed – if not it will download and install it for you. However the launcher also lets you play the game entirely from the hard drive – by copying files from the cd’s. Still with me? The problem was this – if you patched the game and then later told the launcher to copy the game datafiles to hard drive, one file (Grim.tab) would be overwritten by an older version from the cd.

Anyway, it’s fixed now and you can download Grim Fandango Launcher 1.3 here.

While I was looking into this I was reminded of yet another unreleased program of mine. I loaded it up, tidied and tweaked it and the Grim Fandango Dialog Editor is now publicly available. It does what it says on the tin, and allows you to edit the subtitle text in Grim Fandango. This may be useful for those wanting to translate the text into another language.

A great many settings are stored within Psychonauts’ saved games and using this tool you can edit them all. Variables such as the number of lives, rank etc. can be changed and you can even alter more exotic settings such as the model used for inventory items. I myself havent looked into what a lot of the settings do so there’s bound to be more things to discover.

A common tasks menu keeps things simple and allows you to quickly change popular settings such as the number of lives. You can also switch the current level and jump to any level on the game. This tool is probably the closest we’ll come to a Psychonauts debug mode (until someone figures out how to unlock it).

I originally made this tool for my own use, recently though I decided to clean it up, make it a bit more user-friendly and release it. I hope you find it useful.

In other news, I’ve decided to stop development on ScummVM Quick And Easy. Improvements to ScummVM have meant that its far easier to use than its command line driven ancestors, and planned future features such as game autodetection and a new prettier gui call into question the need for a frontend like Q+E. I cant really call a frontend ‘quick and easy’ when it requires you to choose the location of your game and an appropriate target while ScummVM can auto-detect the game itself. Additionally, changes such as the merging of multiple game targets into 1 make it much harder for ScummVM Q+E to co-exist in a clean way with ScummVM.

A new version of Psychonauts Explorer will be out within the next week or so and will feature limited support for the PS2 version along with the usual array of bugfixes and changes.I’ve been having real trouble deciphering the file format for Psychonauts PS2. Part of the problem is the sheer size of the file – its 3gb. I hear on the grapevine though, that a demo of the PS2 version exists. It would really help if I could get hold of the demo files, if anyone out there has the demo please let me know.

Also, if anyone knows about image formats and techniques, particulary those used on the PS2, take a look at this thread and see if you can help.